CVENT CONNECT

Hotels Have Lost the Traveler Relationship to OTAs

Hotels Have Lost the Traveler Relationship to OTAs

Posted: June 15, 2015

Today at Cvent Connect in Las Vegas, nSight Founder Rich Maradik talked on the Big Impact of Big Data in travel. What hit a nerve with the crowd is that loyalty is no longer a main driver in the consumer travel decision. Of course, it may be part of the decision and helps determine the hotel consideration set, but price/value is king. One of the biggest influencers here is that in general, hotels have lost their connection with the traveler to the OTAs.

Hotels can’t compete with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on advertising by OTAs. Digital marketing basics of PPC and SEM offer an uneven playing field when Google search puts your hotel on an OTA sites before your own brand.com. And there can be 3, 5 or more different third-party listings prior to getting to an official site.

There are just too many intermediaries between the consumer and the supplier (the hotel). Are the intermediaries adding true value to the travel consumer and their experience?

There are ways hotels can start getting control of that relationship back. Here are just 3 of them:

Understanding the travel consumer and their shopping behavior

Know your third-party vs direct share for online search as well as bookings

Monitor the impact of your marketing between direct and indirect channels — from a geotargeting and demographic marketing view

Big data offers big learnings for how hotels compete online. To understand how to move the needle, you need to first know where you stand.

To see how your hotel website benchmarks against the OTAs, sign up for a FREE 60-Day Trial of the nSight Hotel Online Traffic Report.